Marine and charter
This is a sector that still sells on contacts and boat shows, while three platforms quietly take all of the search traffic.
A very short, very expensive season
Charter is decided between January and May for one specific summer. That means the ranking work and the campaigns have to be ready in autumn, not in June. We plan the calendar backwards from your client's real booking window, which almost never coincides with when the business is busiest.
High-value, low-volume searches
Nobody searches "boat rental" when they're about to spend forty thousand euros on a week. They search a specific model, a specific length, crewed, departing from a named port. These are tiny-volume, enormous-value searches, and precisely because keyword tools ignore them, the competition doesn't work them.
The customer's language comes before yours
In this sector the local client is the minority. The site needs to be conceived in English first, with solid German, and the local language third: the exact reverse of what almost everyone does out of habit.
Common questions
Does SEO make sense with such low search volume?
That's exactly why it does. With tickets in the tens of thousands, ranking ten very specific searches can be worth more than thousands of generic visits that book nothing.
What about competition from the charter platforms?
They dominate generic searches, just as the portals do in property. The gap is in the specific model, the departure port and specialist services, where a local company with its own fleet has a genuine advantage.
Do you work with shipyards and technical services?
Yes. It's a niche with very precise English-language searches (refit, painting, engine maintenance) and very little well-executed competition in the sector.
Keep reading
- Search engine optimisationRanking first on Google isn't luck and it isn't a bigger budget. It's architecture, content and patience, applied in the language each customer is actually searching in.
- Google AdsAds buy you time while SEO builds it. Run well, they're the fastest way to learn which words actually bring money. Run badly, they're a subscription to Google.
- International and multilingual SEOThree language versions of a site either reinforce each other or quietly cannibalise each other. There is no third outcome, and the difference is a few lines of markup plus a lot of research.
- Conversion rate optimisationDoubling your traffic is slow and expensive. Doubling the proportion of it that buys is often a fortnight's work, and nobody does it first.